Wednesday, February 11, 2015 // The Statement
8B
swells from every corner of the caf-
eteria-disco from every teenaged
body in attendance, his voice rings
true and sharp.
Eric Stanson is a youth volunteer
at Ruth Ellis.
“I LOVE THE WAY YOU MOVE
SO SEXY. LET ME SEE YOU
POP THAT BOOTY,” he screams
when Adrian, no longer pirou-
etting or holding up any middle
fingers, gyrates down the dance
floor. Stanson bellows his anthem
throughout the night, directing
at whoever gathers the requisite
courage to venture down the cat-
walk. He does it tirelessly. He does
it relentlessly. He does it homicid-
ally. He heaves his words with the
weight of a man looking to instill
the fear of God, to change lives. He
does it because, in some ways, he
just may.
Studies by the University of Cali-
fornia, Los Angeles have indicated
46 percent of LGBTQ homeless
youth on the streets run away due
to familial rejection of their sexual
orientation or gender identifica-
tion. In many cases, the resulting
self-doubt and invalidation fes-
ters long into adulthood, only to
materialize in the form of severe
depression or self harm. One of the
ball’s most palpable intentions is to
create a breathable atmosphere of
affirmation, one that any bystand-
er can feel wash over them, can
inhale, exhale with fire.
Roman Bertram, a high school
student who has been visiting
the Center regularly for the past
year, nods casually along to Stan-
son’s red-faced chants, not unlike
a middle-aged Mormon man who
stumbled into a Marilyn Manson
concert.
“They couldn’t get me out there
if they pointed a goddamn flame-
thrower at me,” he says after a beat.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong — I’m
glad I’m here, but shit ... like an
actual flamethrower.”
Bertram leans back when he
laughs. He lets his head fall back
so he can really feel the warmth at
the base of his stomach rise up his
throat on its way to chortle out in
a guffaw. He has kind eyes that he
sometimes winks when he’s in the
middle of telling a joke, eyebrows
that rise comically in the tiny
moments before the man he’s been
glancing at walks by.
Without any prompt, he talks
at length about his plans for the
future.
“I want to major in English,” he
says, with a period. “I don’t really
care where I go, but I want to be
reading when I get there.”
Bertram doesn’t know how he
will pay for college, acknowledg-
ing his high school years have been
“kind of a mess.” After being bul-
lied for much of his freshman and
sophomore year, he began to lose
interest in schoolwork, followed
quickly by any hope that things
could ever change.
“It’s hard to talk about because it
felt like I had such little control at
that time. It was a blur,” he says. “It
was a lot of confusion, then frustra-
tion, then not really caring. I didn’t
know who I was.”
His eyes turn to granite when
he talks about the weeks before he
found Ruth Ellis, scrolling desper-
ately online for some modicum of
understanding — anyone willing to
listen. He felt pride in being ready,
for the first time in his life, to talk.
The search words he used were
“gay,” “Detroit” and “help.”
“I try to be here as much as I can,
usually every day,” he says. “I don’t
even really have to be doing any-
thing: I can just come and sit down
and have regular conversations
with people about literally any-
thing. It started to get better once
I started coming. I felt like, after a
really long time, I wanted to get it
together again. Still, I —”
Bertram’s thoughts are cut short
by a loud crash reverberating from
the other end of the cafeteria-disco.
Two men have fallen face-first into
a chair while trying to execute a
complex bodily maneuver involv-
ing a combination of breakdancing
and tap dancing in sync. More than
half the room now gapes silently,
hands splayed over O’d lips. A bal-
loon pops without much aplomb. As
the downed gentlemen silently rise,
fragments of their dignity hanging
around them in ribbon-like tatters,
the familiar chant starts up again.
Albeit a little quieter, a little shak-
ier.
“I LOVE THE WAY YOU MOVE
SO SEXY ... Let me see you pop that
booty?”
In a weekly meeting of former
Ruth Ellis youth — those who now
have stable jobs and housing after
an extended period of time visiting
the Center — two attendees go over
examples of open-ended questions
as if they were in a high school
journalism class.
The gatherings, called “Out In
The System,” are project-oriented,
and the group — which consists
of approximately ten members
in total — is gearing to propose a
change in the way Detroit’s Child
Protective
Services
interviews
victims before referring them for
foster care. On a dry erase board
hanging in the back, goals like
“Develop research question” and
“Develop research sample” have
been scrawled in black marker by
Tom Molina-Duarte, the leader-
ship and advocacy coordinator
guiding the discussion.
The intention is to select a pool
of viable interview subjects, then
record them answering a series
of questions that Molina-Duartes
hopes will convince CPS to include
Ruth Ellis in the conversation when
they speak with kids about leaving
home or help them better mediate
the relationship between out youth
and their respective families. Moli-
na-Duartes talks patiently.
Often, the dialogue wanders and
the two former Center visitors talk
openly, casually about their pasts.
Victor Kalten doesn’t seem per-
turbed when he discusses the night
he was raped by two men while in
foster care. Bonnie Dyer is luke-
warm when she mentions how cer-
tain members of her family won’t
let her communicate with or even
go near her niece ever since she
came out as a lesbian.
“I feel like a majority of these
kids don’t even make it to foster
care. A lot of them are just out on
the streets,” Kalten says. “I think
the numbers they use to calculate
the percent of homeless people who
are LGBTQ comes from how many
there are in foster homes. Which
doesn’t make sense because there
are so many who never even make
it there.”
“Even in foster care,” he says.
“The fact that you’re LGBT doesn’t
really get discussed. It’s treated
like a secret.”
Kalten talks at length about
the complex disparity between
admitting to the world that you’re
gay and the lead-up to the realiza-
tion that you’re not straight. In a
foster care system where there is
little dialogue about sexual orien-
tation, Kalten feels this lead up can
become unnecessarily drawn out,
even harmful.
“Things changed so much for me
before I told people I was gay and
after,” he says. “It felt like I was
completely unprepared because I
had never simply been told that it
was okay to be gay. No one came up
to me and had a conversation about
it. One of the things I want out of
this project is to make sure other
kids don’t go through the same
thing.”
The stigma, Dyer adds, forces
many LGBTQ individuals to con-
stantly question their circum-
stances, often for good reasons, but
sometimes in ways that can need-
lessly put them at odds with the
people around them. She referenc-
es experiences with the job market.
“I know a lot of people who have
been fired from their jobs after
they’ve been outed,” she explains.
“And they carry that knowledge
with them wherever they go to
work next. It’s the same way when
you’re a kid and you’re being raised
to believe straightness is the only
thing that exists. Without ever
realizing it, it gets so much harder
to trust people to accept who you
are.”
When there isn’t anything else
to say, Bertram watches the danc-
ing quietly. He doesn’t move when
Adrian stuffs two large balloons
into the bust of the dress he pulled
on two hours ago and two more in
the back of his underpants. After a
while, he smiles.
“Flamethrower,” is the only
word he says before walking away.
RUTHELLIS
From Page 8B
“The fact that
you’re LGBT
doesn’t really
get discussed”